


you will define me with a knife

by glueskin



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:06:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24411037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glueskin/pseuds/glueskin
Summary: you can be anyone or just some mother's wasted son - you can be your own god, if you want to.
Relationships: Ethan Nakamura & Alabaster Torrington, Ethan Nakamura & Luke Castellan, One-Sided Ethan Nakamura/Luke Castellan
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	you will define me with a knife

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like 2013 or something because i had a lot of feelings about ethan and i still do. i hear rick riordan is going to be directly involved in the upcoming tv adaption so heres how ethan stans can still win
> 
> i am not above @ing rick riordan every day demanding justice the way i did leading up to the blood of olympus book release
> 
> sorry for any weirdness or mistakes in this. i meant it when i said i wrote it like 7 years ago and i gave it a cursory look over for typos but not much else
> 
> title from "wrecking force" by voxtrot

Six years old. Ethan, with tiny hands and both of his eyes in both of their sockets, small and thin between his father and grandmother as they pray before their ancestors on a muggy, mid-August evening; his aunts and uncles and grandparents, all lined up in a row before blocks of stone, his squirming year-old twin cousins oddly silent despite the amount of noise they usually make.  
  
The smell of the incense—burning up, clogging his young lungs like cigarettes will ten years from this moment—is powerful, like what Ethan imagines death must smell like.  
  
There is movement out of the corner of his left eye; nobody else notices, but he turns his head and just barely catches sight of the distortion that follows the haggard man at a gravestone a few rows behind where Ethan stands.  
  
Grandmother claps her hands together and Ethan follows suit before the movement catches up with his mind.  
  
He forgets the distorted shroud and the haggard man. He does not forget the smell of incense, the many faded names on the gravestones, or the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder as they leave.  
  


* * *

  
Eight. Ethan is small, thin, quiet, still. Diligent in his studies, struggling to switch between speaking Japanese and English every day between home and school and struggling even further with his writing, not understanding the narrow eyed, unhappy expressions of his teachers or why they become so frustrated with him.  
  
Not understanding _yet_.  
  


* * *

  
Ten. Ethan: not quite as small but thin and quiet. No longer very still. At school, there is a fight—not about him, because Ethan doesn’t respond when people speak badly about him, but about a small girl with an accent almost like his, shrinking into herself against the concrete walls of the school building as older boys knock away her painstakingly prepared lunch, laughing at the look of her food and the strong scent of spice.  
  
He goes home early with a days suspension, his jaw bruising from where he had landed on the tile of filthy school hallway, knuckles aching from his missed punch. His only regret is that he didn’t hurt them back.  
  
“I’m sorry, father,” he says, honestly so in the face of his father's pained expression when he arrives home three and a half hours early. He is not sorry for the fight. He is sorry it upset his father.  
  
His father’s mouth tightens. He says, “You shouldn’t have to be.”  
  
 _I shouldn’t_ , Ethan thinks, and then thinks of the little girl, shrinking into the wall and chanting apologies, _She shouldn’t._  
  
They shouldn’t.  
  


* * *

  
Ethan: eleven, nearing twelve. Luke Castellan is three, nearly four years older than he is, but he is bright and beautiful and his hand on the curve of Ethan’s elbow steadies the frustration and anger over the thinly-veiled sullen atmosphere of Hermes cabin.  
  
Alabaster can never stop him from fighting with other campers over it, not like Luke does; he bandages his hands and forces Nectar down his throat after every infraction, but never protests.  
  
Because Ethan has never once been the one to start a fight.  
  
If his father had thought being at Camp during summers would be easier than skittering around street corners and avoiding eye contact with harpies, he was wrong—just as Ethan had been wrong to think the knowledge of why his mother had never once come to him, in all his life, might make him feel the slightest bit better.  
  
After all, what is his life—his pathetic, infinitesimal life, half human life—matter to a woman, a goddess, who will live millennia longer, who will have hundreds, if not thousands more children before she crumbles out of existence?  
  
What is his life? What is he?  
  
He thinks about the plot of land purchased for his father in Japan—his name, written in red, next to his four sisters and two brothers, and Ethan’s own right next to his father. Bright red, like his human blood.  
  
Ethan Nakamura is not yet twelve. In his first summer at Camp Half Blood, he gets into three fights, sleeps in Alabaster’s bed only, and Luke Castellan curbs his growing anger with a smile just soft enough to take his edge off, hair as gold as the ichor their god-parents must bleed.  
  
“I don’t like gods,” he tells Alabaster in the hush of Hermes cabin, nine days before he’s set to go home—to the restaurant, to school, to late night anpan stolen from the pantry and the clinging scent of his father’s imported cigarettes—and Alabaster sucks in a breath through his teeth.  
  
The gods leave their children bitter and unclaimed, desperate for answers they may die never receiving, wanting to know parents who will never care enough to even tell them by their own mouth what they are. Ethan does not like gods.  
  
“I don’t, either,” Alabaster says quietly.  
  
No, Ethan thinks. The gods of Olympus are nothing to revere.  
  


* * *

  
Fourteen. Ethan spends his winters in Japan now and not his summers; he doesn’t celebrate obon with his family but instead celebrates the New Year, his aunts and uncles drinking their fill around the kotatsu while Ethan is left in charge of the little ones.  
  
Sekigi—Aunt Sachiko’s only child—is the only cousin his age. They don’t help him because they like to watch the twins climb Ethan—who is taller, now; growing into himself, more lithe than thin—as if he is some sort of tree, begging him to tell them more Camp stories, to show them that trick with Aunt Sachiko’s _bokken_ or Grandmother’s old naginata. The twins are eight, nearly nine; the younger ones are six and four.  
  
There are too many children—Ethan can still remember, six years old, choking on incense when the twins were barely a year old.  
  
Ethan rings in the new year with bruised ribs and toddlers pulling at his hair, stuffed to the brim with osechi and the one saucer of sake his father had allowed him to drink. Everyone around him is human. Their blood is red, their pulses thin and blue beneath their skin. They do not turn corners and feel the eyes of an Empousa boring into the back of their skull, they do not fester resentment for deities that sire them and leave them to rot without any understanding of why.  
  
He sleeps with Sekigi’s cold feet digging into his back, the covers of their futon pushed to the side as they drool against their pillow and the twins laying on his arm in such a way that he’ll wake up to it on pins and needles. The empousa, the harpies, the gorgons; they skirt away from Japan and its gods and Ethan doesn’t let himself wonder if he might have ever had a chance for normalcy if his father had never studied abroad.  
  
He thinks about Luke’s disappearance instead, about the open request for him and Alabaster, a hand on his elbow to curve the anger that almost always thrums in Ethan’s blood these days. Luke’s cold, cold eyes, flecked with a desperation Ethan had never seen, an expression that stirred up a hot desire in his chest—for the world Luke had spoken of, where unclaimed children wouldn’t die so needlessly, wouldn’t be left to wonder for the entirety of their short lives, _why me? who are you? why?_  
  
 _Why?_  
  


* * *

  
Fifteen, summer. Ethan still sleeps in Alabaster’s bed, sometimes on the floor; occasionally, he climbs in with Clovis.  
  
Nobody talks about Luke. Everybody talks about Jackson. Nobody talks about the high strung tension, the growing desire among those unclaimed to _know_ .  
  
Ethan spends the summer thinking about Luke’s hair, ichor-gold, and of his weak, human blood. He wants so much. The Gods want everything, and they take everything, but they give nothing. Ethan, he wants to live a half decent life. He wonders when he stopped thinking of his life as half decent, when he stopped assuming he would inherit his father's restaurant, when he began to believe that his father would outlive him and that the red of Ethan’s name would be scrubbed off their gravestone years before his father's.  
  
He’s fifteen, yet he’s resigned himself to an early death; to never spending years cooking alongside his father; to never meeting his cousin’s first boyfriend; to never watching the twins grow up and helping them learn to fight with something other than a flimsy bokken in his aunt’s dojo.  
  
And the Gods still want.  
  
Luke had told him to wait until his sixteenth birthday to tell him of choice. He doesn’t need to wait until November when the cold starts creeping in as quietly as the resentment had. It lives in the hollows of his bones with the desire for change, for something fair and _right_.  
  
Humans keep Gods alive, he thinks. They live because humans believe they exist. And this is what they do to the humans they supposedly love, to the children they birth.  
  
Before summer ends, Ethan knows he’ll pack his bag and leave and Alabaster will follow. By the end of the year, he’ll start smoking cheap cigarettes to remind him of his father’s own terrible habit. By the next summer, he will dig his left eye out of his skull.  
  
In a year and a half, Ethan Nakamura will die, and the very people he’ll die for won’t even remember his name.

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact i love coffee and my username is glueskin


End file.
